I recently bought an Android phone from AT&T (this model is the Fusion). I'm on prepaid and it costs me a flat $25 a month (give or take). With no data plan at all, it works like a fancy PDA. It does get wireless, so if I'm on a wireless network, it costs me nothing for data.
Why I said "while it lasts" is because the older Fusion is $125 and works better than a 2nd generation iPhone did. The newer replacement version is $130 and while it has a better camera (joy!), it's missing a ton of small but important features. I pull down the top menu on the main screen, it gives me a list - wi-fi/bluetooth/gps/data. I can turn them on and off on the go in literally 1 second. The "better" phone has that all buried in sub-menus and is obviously not wanting you to mess with the settings. AT&T wants to make it extremely difficult to use the phone in anything other than "lots of data is running in the background all the time" mode.
Also, the older device has a GPS built-in that is easy to use without a data connection. It at least will show you your location on a basic map (no data required if the app keeps a cache of local maps, which a couple do) - which makes it useful for Geo-caching and similar off-grid tasks. Load up the local maps and go - no need to use Google maps since all you really want to know are things like where the nearest onramp or exit is.
So that's how you do it, folks. Get a prepaid Android device. Make sure it is simple to turn on and off services on the fly, especially data. Turn on Wi-Fi on your router or motherboard. Or get a $20 wi-fi card. 10 cents a minute, and sure, you're not connected 24/7, but hopping from wi-fi to wi-fi spot isn't difficult. It sure beats paying 80+ a month and being locked into a two year plan. If you need to download a new app, get on the Google Play Store site from a PC, find what you want, and set it to queue up. Then go to your local wi-fi spot and let if do its thing in the background while you're drinking your coffee.
This is also exactly what oil companies do as well.
Sure, there's no actual collusion, but they watch each other minute by minute and move in lock-step to protect their shared interests. Since they have a captive audience, economic theories that you waste your time learning in colleges no longer apply. In the end, those pretty-on-paper theories all fall apart when people get involved and decide to abuse them to their advantage.
Well, Wipeout is supposed to be a clone of Takeshi's Castle, which was absolutely insane.
This, though... When you consider that the average person in America is fat and lazy, and the course is really designed for people with lots of muscles and about 125-140 lbs body weight, it's not too surprising that they took 500+ people and ran them through qualifiers. They then were left with 100 reasonably competent people to go at it who had a chance of completing it and, well, they got about 15 people to finish stage 1. About double the number in Japan, but considering that we have a bit more than double the population of Japan, it's within reason. Note - the final stage 1 in Las Vegas was a virtual clone of Sasuke 27 and 28, down to the inch. we moaned at the warped wall being a gimmie in the qualifiers, but there it was in all its ugliness in Las Vegas.
From what I can gather, they have taken great pains to make it as miserable and horrifyingly difficult as the original in the last three stages for this year. And they expect nobody to really win it. I expect maybe 5 or 6 to even make it to stage 3. They they all fail. The jumps and distances, especially on the last obstacle of part 3, are practically un-doable. We might see 1 or 2 people try the last climb. Good luck with that.
They have run it for four seasons so far. Nobody has made it past stage 3. And they've made it harder this year.
No, All it does is hasten the move towards obsolescence for Ubuntu and a move to a better fork instead.
There's a real reason I use Mint now, and it's not because of me saying that it's better. It's that Ubuntu has just simply gotten so much worse and bloated lately. In addition, the person in charge of Ubuntu's development is a type-A asshat is essentially acting exactly like your typical tyrannical CEO at work. "You'll suffer under my vision of how things should be and like it".
As if. I jumped ship over a year ago and have never looked back.
Ubuntu getting you upset? Find something else and be happy.
It does seem odd that Nvidia is just giving away customers to ATI. It's not like ATI makes junk, either. If we were talking cars, it would be like Mercedes and BMW. Mercedes makes slightly better cars, but their total dropping of manuals in the U.S. in the last year or two has basically just handed over a small but important chunk of the market to BMW.
The easiest way to deliver the drivers would be to manually ship them out on CDs for $5 or $10. That way, any version online would be "not approved" and easier to deal with legally.
You seem to think that I want to pay nothing, like the rest of them. I'm willing to pay money. I just want my machine to work and have a little freedom on the side. Nvidia's refusal to release their drivers even at a price is inane. But so is the insistence by the other side that everything in Linux be free even if it means you're stuck with broken programs and a horrible experience.
With the issue of a mouse driver, it's doubly crazy. Every mouse has a driver on a floppy or CD that comes with it. I've bought enough mice over the years from Logitech to pay for that 3-4K worth of code ten times over. If your machine has a mouse connected to it, you already have bought and paid for the mouse driver. Just, the code isn't integrated into Linux. I suppose you could pull the code out, insert it, and re-compile everything, but that's just crazy. The same goes with a sound card. You bought the sound card. It came with a sound driver. But because of the holy war that's going on right now, you as the end user are stuck.
The issue is that, like I said, both sides are just as awful about it. There is little middle-ground. In Windows case with the DVDs, we all bought software to play DVDs if we needed to do so (mine came with my video card - crappy software that it was). What bothers me (the mouse issue is just a tiny example, and is not something that requires support, as it's 20+year old patents/code/etc we're talking about 3-4K of code here that dates back to Windows 3.1) is the unwillingness of both sides to meet in the middle.
I pay for codecs and drivers when they are available (sometimes, there IS a free version that works, usually it's just crap though). It's a cheap amount of money, really. But you have fools like Torvalds on one side saying "give it to us for free!" and the other side saying "we're releasing nothing". The "pay to use it" option is rarely available. Nvidia says they do work with Linux devices. Well, show us where we as the end-user can buy the driver for Linux for $10.
I just want my machine to work. Not to get stuck in the middle of some holy war about free for all eternity and through all alternate universes versus never going to give up my rights, even when the sun has burned itself out. It's either 100% or 0% and nothing in the middle.
What we need is a more same approach to all of this. I'd gladly pay for a copy of Linux with actual drivers and codecs and all of the rest that worked. This idea of "we can't let anything commercial pollute the sanctity of our distro's freedom" has to stop. Especially when the same group of hypocrites is often running for-profit versions or code on the side. If it were a group of guys living a bohemian lifestyle who were coding something in their free time, I could kind of understand, but when a company is grinding out a free and a pay-to-use version and then starts preaching to me that they can't offer me the drivers even if I wanted to pay for them, it gripes me.
I hate Windows, but honestly, I hate Linux just about as much. One puts me in a straight-jacket and the other leaves in on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
First off, Nvidia are buttheads. They are. But they also have a right to make money. Apple, EA games, Sony, Intel, and on an on - they all operate this way, as does 99% of business. Where Nvidia is wrong is, well, where can I go out and pay $5 or $10 for a driver from them that works? You see, part of it is that the companies say that they offer a proprietary driver but I can't actually go out and BUY it from them or obtain it from them.
But this brings up the other side of the dirty coin, as it were. That the Linux (in particular) community seems to have a major issue with paying for anything. I have zero issue with paying small fees. I do it all the time. I pay for my sandwich at lunch, my gas in my car, and well, pretty much everything in life. I just want a solution and to move on to the dozen other things that that I have to do during my day. So there's this great divide. They often don't even deal with issues or fix things at all, because it requires paying "the man" or using their code. ie - if it's not free and 100% open-source, we won't touch it at all.
It's just as bad as Windows. They have effectively decided that you're SOL and stuck with their vision of 100% free or it's impossible to obtain view of their OS (which while open-source, is controlled on most Distros by a group of whingey, anal buttheads that might as well be CEOs at a typical software company, since they control the project with an iron fist) And this filters down to the forums and "help" groups that are as useful as a wet rag most of the time. Yes, the people mean well, but it's always "just install this". Without any explanation or documentation. Instead of mentioning the exact codecs you need to buy, they just will say "there is no package for that". No link - it's this attitude that if it's not 100% free, we don't even mention it or link to it.
This idiocy is most apparent with "projects" like Wine. There has been a long-standing mouse driver issue that never gets discussed, fixed, or worked on. Because the code to make it work, is proprietary and there is no work-around (requires paying Microsoft a small fee, and their code is the only way to make it work properly). Cedega had a version of the driver that worked. Cedega went out of business, and as an end-user, stuff just stopped working a few months ago. The mouse driver(among other things like sound drivers and so on) and is effectively locked away as it's Cedega's proprietary (and legally protected) code. Wine won't release it.(yes, these are the same people) The official response over at Wine is "there is no fix". There is an actual fix, but they refuse to release it or make it available for a small fee.
They whine about everything having to be open-source to the point of acting like it's a holy war, and yet when there's money involved, the same people don't act any different than Nvidia.
Me, I just want to pay my fee and get on with my life.
The issue isn't the physical damage from the expanding nebula but the intense energy (mostly gamma-ray) burst that happens when the star collapses. Basically anything within a few hundred light years gets hammered by a shotgun of energy if it's aligned with the poles of the star.
http://f64.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/ More reading on our monitoring attempts, though anything that would hit us would be noticed pretty much about the time it hit us.
That's certainly true, but it's not worth taking that chance, no matter how small it is.
Al it takes is one bad day and someone saying something they shouldn't. We learned this all too well in WWII. Loose lips sink ships. Just don't take the chance and keep things to yourself.
The advantageous thing for us about their structure is that they operate in cells and are very loosely organized. So while they are hard to track down, they also cannot quickly mobilize, either. When you have minutes to react, spreading information by word of mouth or through intermediaries simply isn't quick enough. Doubly so since they don't have satellites, planes, radar, or other technology that a modern army would have that would allow them to track a target. By the time they are just starting to roll out in a couple of trucks with some guys in the back to attack the target, it's already on its way home at 20,000 ft.
That said, it's still a horribly stupid thing to do as there are countries in the area that might take a shot at the plane(s). Flying to Afghanistan does bring you fairly close to Iran, as an example. And all they have to do is claim "oops", it was a rebel faction (wink wink) if it fails.
The tag should have been "Someone's getting fired"
I'd actually worry about yesterday's prediction, though. We have an enormous problem with our worldwide food supplies and too many people to feed. Too much trash and negative impacts on the environment as well. Combine that with the fact that middle east oil will be largely gone by then, and the situation is ripe for another world war at the least.
Alternate reality was the first RPG with a persistent setting and 3D graphics (that actually worked like 3D). It had time of day, economics, it kept track of your alignment/morality and so you could end up being banned from certain shops (as an example). Truly ingenious. For top-down 2D, though, the crown jewel was Ultima IV. Everything that ever came out on the NES and other consoles was a pale imitation of the same thing. They tried, but never reached the same level of complexity and refinement. Eventually they did with the Playstation and some of its titles, but that was almost ten years later.
Also, if you want to go old old OLD school, the first game that I know of that did a proper dungeon type setting was Temple of Apshai. Most of these games, though, since they never made it to PC, where forgotten. I think 1979 is plenty old, (TRS-80). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai Note the reference made in 1986 to Apshai and Rogue as the foundation of the genre. (quoted from Dragon magazine, which at the time was pretty much the authority on the subject).
Also, his choice of space-sim was.. odd. Elite is the title to go there, without a doubt.
Lastly, there are a slew of other old titles that should be considered that were made by (oddly enough), Avalon Hill.
Heh. In this case, it works since we're talking about very rough estimates. The simple answer - roughly the same effect as what happened in Japan, minus the earthquake. Given that it's in the 70 megaton+ energy range, that's not too surprising.
note - the 7 meter wave is on the ocean's surface, which can translate to a much larger wave once it hits the shore. Possibly over 50ft in areas with the correct beach conditions. (note how a nearly identical height wave in the ocean off Japan translated to 70-80 ft in certain bays and areas) It's survivable, but it's also a major disaster. http://www.science.org.au/nova/045/045key.htm.
Note how this site mentions a 400 theoretical meter asteroid and a well over 100meter(!) tsunami. 7 meters is a Japan like event. Some areas hardly felt a thing, others just got obliterated. One area was just the wrong combination and the water finally stopped up in the mountains, creating a whole new lake at over 1000 ft. But, of course, 140 meters is something that could easily be shot at or blown into smaller pieces first.
While this might be true in the far future, there are types of games that will require a level of complexity that you can't dumb-down enough and fit into a hand-held controller. There's simply no way that you can effectively play a game like WoW without a keyboard. Other games require high resolution graphics that exceed most people's TVs to be effectively played.
1: Doom on the consoles was actually tried and it stunk due to the consoles of the time having very poor sound and video. The PC side by that time was running Quake and Team Fortress. The PCs just simply moved faster and farther than the consoles could keep up with, since it's cheap to just add a better video card. The major problem consoles have is that they are set in stone hardware-wise, so you rapidly have an ancient system. A good example is to look at how many games on the PS3 are 720P. Very few are 1080P and even then, they are limited to 30fps and have horribly compressed and down-graded textures.
Battlefield 3 is quite frankly a let-down on the consoles. No mouse, no keyboard (hardware can do it, it's purposely disabled as it would create an "unfair advantage"). FPS is limited to 30, resolution is a pathetic 720P, which PC long ago went past (every monitor since about 2000 can do 1280X1024 minimum) , and the maps are roughly 1/4 the size. On top of that, you are limited to EA's servers and half the players.
WEAK SAUCE.
2: At the same time that the PS2 was trying to do its online gaming which was extremely weak, you had Counterstrike in full force on the PC side. A few hundred servers by a few dozen companies versus literally over a hundred thousand at its height.
3: MMOGs have never caught on on any of the consoles, even to date. Sure, there are a few pseudo ones that are coming out of Japan, but nothing, say, like Eve Online, WoW, Entropia, Second LIie, and... (huge list goes on and on) Since many of these games also use web based front-ends, which is a sore point for many consoles, it's a real problem. You can't play a game like Astro Empires on a console. Not without a keyboard, at the least. Intense micro-management RPGs also are full of problems. As great as Oblivion was, every minute I played it I was thinking "God, I want a proper keyboard and mouse."
The lack of mandatory 1080P and keyboard/mouse is that's currently holding the consoles back. But since that would make it a "PC" and they don't want to go in that direction, well, we have this divide that isn't going to change any time soon. You simply can't dumb-down an interface that much and expect it to work effectively. Steam's box, though has a lot of promise as it's not trying to fit a genre but a product.
4: Half-life was a joke. Deus Ex was a disaster. Bioware and most of that genre (Mass Effect and so on) were designed to be console games from the beginning, so porting them back to the PC doesn't really count. By that time, though, you had games like HalfLife 2, FEAR, and so on, which even though they were ported to consoles, looked extremely sad.
It may be a matter of time until consoles catch up, but PCs always will move ahead quite a lot faster.
PC games are driven by one segment that consoles have yet to make a dent in, which is MMOGs. As long as you need a PC to play WoW and games like it, PCs are going absolutely nowhere for the foreseeable future. And, honestly, Steam does work better than XBox live or the PS3's kludge when it comes to actually keeping track of friends and finding players to play with in most games. Being able to sort by half a dozen variables in most games as well simply doesn't happen with the consoles, either. A great example is compare BF3's servers. How many are actually running with Hardcore, which turns on friendly fire damage?(A: ZERO EA servers and literally 10-12 non EA ones) How easy is it to find a server and save it as a favorite? On the PC, it's dead simple by comparison and many people are running their own servers.
Until we see WoW and other games like it on consoles, AND playing on the same servers, you simply don't have to worry about PCs disappearing.
You're wrongly assuming that they wouldn't just pay Microsoft to use the DirectX drivers. It's a lot cheaper than paying for a whole copy of Windows. Also, NVidia is releasing their drivers for Linux, so there's a good chance that when it's a big multi-million dollar company talking to them, they'll come up with some solution that works and is just rolled into the price of the console.
It's kind of an odd thing, really, that so many people who run Linux automatically assume that you can't use proprietary code. You or I might not *want* to pay for those codecs and drivers just because we're cheap or have some personal issue with doing so, but Steam certainly would have no such reservations.
Of course, the best way to solve this issue would be to have it use Linux and a custom-designed version of Wine. Basically what Transgaming did. It's not going to be easy, but they certainly have the resources to pull it off and if they can, it will mean maybe $20 in licensing fees for a few drivers and codecs, and beyond that, nothing at all.
After all, it's not going to run anything aside from games most of the time and this would allow them to likely use a basic integrated board like a multi-core Atom or similar with a dedicated Nvidia card added. By sticking with off-the shelf components and not having to pay for licensing fees, they can probably crank out a prototype for under a million dollars - way under what a typical console costs to develop. We're talking about $300-$400 or so for a machine that plays your entire Steam library. And if they can come out with it by this holiday season, they'll have blown a huge hole in the nex gen XBox and PS4's market (which is at least a year or two off).
You can count me in as one of them. Not to be a fanboy or anything, but I've been playing around with Mint and it's surprising at how it works without having to pull your hair out. Well enough out of the box that the learning curve is easy enough for my teenage son to figure out. I introduced him to it as his first *IX environment and he's adapting almost as quickly as he did when he first got his hands on my grandparent's Apple.(talking about new user to comfortable in a few *days*) It even auto-detected and configured itself to my network in 5 seconds flat. Sound, video, USB, the works - done and done.
But it's not just Mint. The amount of innovation that is going on in the latest distros (just this last year or so) is incredible. To the point where there are plenty of alternatives that even complete with Windows for once. Especially when a 13 year old kid can DIY and get it right in a single afternoon.
Suse is kind of in a hard place now as distros go. It's well off of the curve code-wise and is looking terribly dated. Of course, there's the whole GUI-hate issue because most of them now suck or are trying to look like an iPhone (not all progress is good, though, especially in the interfaces), but that's an entirely new series of rants... Thankfully you're not stuck there, either, with half a dozen major ones to chose from.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Modern printers usually have a control interface application that tells you how much ink is left and what print options are set and so on. Also, they talk back to the typical application in order to make sure that page settings are correct and that your preview function isn't just it hoping for the best. This is especially true of photo printers, which have a whole set of software running to make sure that your settings are properly calibrated when you scan and/or print.
Working as designed, and in fact, no different than, say, installing a sound card, which has its own software and drivers that go with it. How is the OS supposed to know that it's a legitimate driver and not some virus? I'd rather have it be too careful than take Windows approach of everything is fine unless it hits me upside my head and mugs me.
Besides, bitching about a printer just shows how insular people like him have become after all of these years. Perhaps he should just go buy an IPad and wheel himself into the retirement home.
Heh. I think this judge is going to get his ass handed to him in short order, anyways. I've never heard of such a ludicrous law. It would be so easy to force the issue to conflict with one of more basic legal rights (such as marriage or something similar).
If two of the 4 were developing romantic feelings for each other
This does bring up an interesting point, which is that what does happen if one of them decides to marry one of the other people of the group? I don't think there is any precedent for legally forbidding two normal people to get married.
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I recently bought an Android phone from AT&T (this model is the Fusion). I'm on prepaid and it costs me a flat $25 a month (give or take). With no data plan at all, it works like a fancy PDA. It does get wireless, so if I'm on a wireless network, it costs me nothing for data.
Why I said "while it lasts" is because the older Fusion is $125 and works better than a 2nd generation iPhone did. The newer replacement version is $130 and while it has a better camera (joy!), it's missing a ton of small but important features. I pull down the top menu on the main screen, it gives me a list - wi-fi/bluetooth/gps/data. I can turn them on and off on the go in literally 1 second. The "better" phone has that all buried in sub-menus and is obviously not wanting you to mess with the settings. AT&T wants to make it extremely difficult to use the phone in anything other than "lots of data is running in the background all the time" mode.
Also, the older device has a GPS built-in that is easy to use without a data connection. It at least will show you your location on a basic map (no data required if the app keeps a cache of local maps, which a couple do) - which makes it useful for Geo-caching and similar off-grid tasks. Load up the local maps and go - no need to use Google maps since all you really want to know are things like where the nearest onramp or exit is.
So that's how you do it, folks. Get a prepaid Android device. Make sure it is simple to turn on and off services on the fly, especially data. Turn on Wi-Fi on your router or motherboard. Or get a $20 wi-fi card. 10 cents a minute, and sure, you're not connected 24/7, but hopping from wi-fi to wi-fi spot isn't difficult. It sure beats paying 80+ a month and being locked into a two year plan. If you need to download a new app, get on the Google Play Store site from a PC, find what you want, and set it to queue up. Then go to your local wi-fi spot and let if do its thing in the background while you're drinking your coffee.
This is also exactly what oil companies do as well.
Sure, there's no actual collusion, but they watch each other minute by minute and move in lock-step to protect their shared interests. Since they have a captive audience, economic theories that you waste your time learning in colleges no longer apply. In the end, those pretty-on-paper theories all fall apart when people get involved and decide to abuse them to their advantage.
Well, Wipeout is supposed to be a clone of Takeshi's Castle, which was absolutely insane.
This, though... When you consider that the average person in America is fat and lazy, and the course is really designed for people with lots of muscles and about 125-140 lbs body weight, it's not too surprising that they took 500+ people and ran them through qualifiers. They then were left with 100 reasonably competent people to go at it who had a chance of completing it and, well, they got about 15 people to finish stage 1. About double the number in Japan, but considering that we have a bit more than double the population of Japan, it's within reason. Note - the final stage 1 in Las Vegas was a virtual clone of Sasuke 27 and 28, down to the inch. we moaned at the warped wall being a gimmie in the qualifiers, but there it was in all its ugliness in Las Vegas.
From what I can gather, they have taken great pains to make it as miserable and horrifyingly difficult as the original in the last three stages for this year. And they expect nobody to really win it. I expect maybe 5 or 6 to even make it to stage 3. They they all fail. The jumps and distances, especially on the last obstacle of part 3, are practically un-doable. We might see 1 or 2 people try the last climb. Good luck with that.
They have run it for four seasons so far. Nobody has made it past stage 3. And they've made it harder this year.
No, All it does is hasten the move towards obsolescence for Ubuntu and a move to a better fork instead.
There's a real reason I use Mint now, and it's not because of me saying that it's better. It's that Ubuntu has just simply gotten so much worse and bloated lately. In addition, the person in charge of Ubuntu's development is a type-A asshat is essentially acting exactly like your typical tyrannical CEO at work. "You'll suffer under my vision of how things should be and like it".
As if. I jumped ship over a year ago and have never looked back.
Ubuntu getting you upset? Find something else and be happy.
It does seem odd that Nvidia is just giving away customers to ATI. It's not like ATI makes junk, either. If we were talking cars, it would be like Mercedes and BMW. Mercedes makes slightly better cars, but their total dropping of manuals in the U.S. in the last year or two has basically just handed over a small but important chunk of the market to BMW.
The easiest way to deliver the drivers would be to manually ship them out on CDs for $5 or $10. That way, any version online would be "not approved" and easier to deal with legally.
You seem to think that I want to pay nothing, like the rest of them. I'm willing to pay money. I just want my machine to work and have a little freedom on the side. Nvidia's refusal to release their drivers even at a price is inane. But so is the insistence by the other side that everything in Linux be free even if it means you're stuck with broken programs and a horrible experience.
With the issue of a mouse driver, it's doubly crazy. Every mouse has a driver on a floppy or CD that comes with it. I've bought enough mice over the years from Logitech to pay for that 3-4K worth of code ten times over. If your machine has a mouse connected to it, you already have bought and paid for the mouse driver. Just, the code isn't integrated into Linux. I suppose you could pull the code out, insert it, and re-compile everything, but that's just crazy. The same goes with a sound card. You bought the sound card. It came with a sound driver. But because of the holy war that's going on right now, you as the end user are stuck.
The issue is that, like I said, both sides are just as awful about it. There is little middle-ground. In Windows case with the DVDs, we all bought software to play DVDs if we needed to do so (mine came with my video card - crappy software that it was). What bothers me (the mouse issue is just a tiny example, and is not something that requires support, as it's 20+year old patents/code/etc we're talking about 3-4K of code here that dates back to Windows 3.1) is the unwillingness of both sides to meet in the middle.
I pay for codecs and drivers when they are available (sometimes, there IS a free version that works, usually it's just crap though). It's a cheap amount of money, really. But you have fools like Torvalds on one side saying "give it to us for free!" and the other side saying "we're releasing nothing". The "pay to use it" option is rarely available. Nvidia says they do work with Linux devices. Well, show us where we as the end-user can buy the driver for Linux for $10.
I just want my machine to work. Not to get stuck in the middle of some holy war about free for all eternity and through all alternate universes versus never going to give up my rights, even when the sun has burned itself out. It's either 100% or 0% and nothing in the middle.
What we need is a more same approach to all of this. I'd gladly pay for a copy of Linux with actual drivers and codecs and all of the rest that worked. This idea of "we can't let anything commercial pollute the sanctity of our distro's freedom" has to stop. Especially when the same group of hypocrites is often running for-profit versions or code on the side. If it were a group of guys living a bohemian lifestyle who were coding something in their free time, I could kind of understand, but when a company is grinding out a free and a pay-to-use version and then starts preaching to me that they can't offer me the drivers even if I wanted to pay for them, it gripes me.
I hate Windows, but honestly, I hate Linux just about as much. One puts me in a straight-jacket and the other leaves in on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
First off, Nvidia are buttheads. They are. But they also have a right to make money. Apple, EA games, Sony, Intel, and on an on - they all operate this way, as does 99% of business. Where Nvidia is wrong is, well, where can I go out and pay $5 or $10 for a driver from them that works? You see, part of it is that the companies say that they offer a proprietary driver but I can't actually go out and BUY it from them or obtain it from them.
But this brings up the other side of the dirty coin, as it were. That the Linux (in particular) community seems to have a major issue with paying for anything. I have zero issue with paying small fees. I do it all the time. I pay for my sandwich at lunch, my gas in my car, and well, pretty much everything in life. I just want a solution and to move on to the dozen other things that that I have to do during my day. So there's this great divide. They often don't even deal with issues or fix things at all, because it requires paying "the man" or using their code. ie - if it's not free and 100% open-source, we won't touch it at all.
It's just as bad as Windows. They have effectively decided that you're SOL and stuck with their vision of 100% free or it's impossible to obtain view of their OS (which while open-source, is controlled on most Distros by a group of whingey, anal buttheads that might as well be CEOs at a typical software company, since they control the project with an iron fist) And this filters down to the forums and "help" groups that are as useful as a wet rag most of the time. Yes, the people mean well, but it's always "just install this". Without any explanation or documentation. Instead of mentioning the exact codecs you need to buy, they just will say "there is no package for that". No link - it's this attitude that if it's not 100% free, we don't even mention it or link to it.
This idiocy is most apparent with "projects" like Wine. There has been a long-standing mouse driver issue that never gets discussed, fixed, or worked on. Because the code to make it work, is proprietary and there is no work-around (requires paying Microsoft a small fee, and their code is the only way to make it work properly). Cedega had a version of the driver that worked. Cedega went out of business, and as an end-user, stuff just stopped working a few months ago. The mouse driver(among other things like sound drivers and so on) and is effectively locked away as it's Cedega's proprietary (and legally protected) code. Wine won't release it.(yes, these are the same people) The official response over at Wine is "there is no fix". There is an actual fix, but they refuse to release it or make it available for a small fee.
They whine about everything having to be open-source to the point of acting like it's a holy war, and yet when there's money involved, the same people don't act any different than Nvidia.
Me, I just want to pay my fee and get on with my life.
Actually they won't. They'll be digging out from under 20+ feet of ash.
The issue isn't the physical damage from the expanding nebula but the intense energy (mostly gamma-ray) burst that happens when the star collapses. Basically anything within a few hundred light years gets hammered by a shotgun of energy if it's aligned with the poles of the star.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
http://f64.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/
More reading on our monitoring attempts, though anything that would hit us would be noticed pretty much about the time it hit us.
That's certainly true, but it's not worth taking that chance, no matter how small it is.
Al it takes is one bad day and someone saying something they shouldn't. We learned this all too well in WWII. Loose lips sink ships. Just don't take the chance and keep things to yourself.
The advantageous thing for us about their structure is that they operate in cells and are very loosely organized. So while they are hard to track down, they also cannot quickly mobilize, either. When you have minutes to react, spreading information by word of mouth or through intermediaries simply isn't quick enough. Doubly so since they don't have satellites, planes, radar, or other technology that a modern army would have that would allow them to track a target. By the time they are just starting to roll out in a couple of trucks with some guys in the back to attack the target, it's already on its way home at 20,000 ft.
That said, it's still a horribly stupid thing to do as there are countries in the area that might take a shot at the plane(s). Flying to Afghanistan does bring you fairly close to Iran, as an example. And all they have to do is claim "oops", it was a rebel faction (wink wink) if it fails.
The tag should have been "Someone's getting fired"
I'd actually worry about yesterday's prediction, though. We have an enormous problem with our worldwide food supplies and too many people to feed. Too much trash and negative impacts on the environment as well. Combine that with the fact that middle east oil will be largely gone by then, and the situation is ripe for another world war at the least.
Beat me to it :)
Alternate reality was the first RPG with a persistent setting and 3D graphics (that actually worked like 3D). It had time of day, economics, it kept track of your alignment/morality and so you could end up being banned from certain shops (as an example). Truly ingenious. For top-down 2D, though, the crown jewel was Ultima IV. Everything that ever came out on the NES and other consoles was a pale imitation of the same thing. They tried, but never reached the same level of complexity and refinement. Eventually they did with the Playstation and some of its titles, but that was almost ten years later.
Also, if you want to go old old OLD school, the first game that I know of that did a proper dungeon type setting was Temple of Apshai. Most of these games, though, since they never made it to PC, where forgotten. I think 1979 is plenty old, (TRS-80). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai Note the reference made in 1986 to Apshai and Rogue as the foundation of the genre. (quoted from Dragon magazine, which at the time was pretty much the authority on the subject).
Also, his choice of space-sim was.. odd. Elite is the title to go there, without a doubt.
Lastly, there are a slew of other old titles that should be considered that were made by (oddly enough), Avalon Hill.
Heh. In this case, it works since we're talking about very rough estimates. The simple answer - roughly the same effect as what happened in Japan, minus the earthquake. Given that it's in the 70 megaton+ energy range, that's not too surprising.
note - the 7 meter wave is on the ocean's surface, which can translate to a much larger wave once it hits the shore. Possibly over 50ft in areas with the correct beach conditions. (note how a nearly identical height wave in the ocean off Japan translated to 70-80 ft in certain bays and areas) It's survivable, but it's also a major disaster. http://www.science.org.au/nova/045/045key.htm.
Note how this site mentions a 400 theoretical meter asteroid and a well over 100meter(!) tsunami. 7 meters is a Japan like event. Some areas hardly felt a thing, others just got obliterated. One area was just the wrong combination and the water finally stopped up in the mountains, creating a whole new lake at over 1000 ft. But, of course, 140 meters is something that could easily be shot at or blown into smaller pieces first.
While this might be true in the far future, there are types of games that will require a level of complexity that you can't dumb-down enough and fit into a hand-held controller. There's simply no way that you can effectively play a game like WoW without a keyboard. Other games require high resolution graphics that exceed most people's TVs to be effectively played.
1: Doom on the consoles was actually tried and it stunk due to the consoles of the time having very poor sound and video. The PC side by that time was running Quake and Team Fortress. The PCs just simply moved faster and farther than the consoles could keep up with, since it's cheap to just add a better video card. The major problem consoles have is that they are set in stone hardware-wise, so you rapidly have an ancient system. A good example is to look at how many games on the PS3 are 720P. Very few are 1080P and even then, they are limited to 30fps and have horribly compressed and down-graded textures.
Battlefield 3 is quite frankly a let-down on the consoles. No mouse, no keyboard (hardware can do it, it's purposely disabled as it would create an "unfair advantage"). FPS is limited to 30, resolution is a pathetic 720P, which PC long ago went past (every monitor since about 2000 can do 1280X1024 minimum) , and the maps are roughly 1/4 the size. On top of that, you are limited to EA's servers and half the players.
WEAK SAUCE.
2: At the same time that the PS2 was trying to do its online gaming which was extremely weak, you had Counterstrike in full force on the PC side. A few hundred servers by a few dozen companies versus literally over a hundred thousand at its height.
3: MMOGs have never caught on on any of the consoles, even to date. Sure, there are a few pseudo ones that are coming out of Japan, but nothing, say, like Eve Online, WoW, Entropia, Second LIie, and... (huge list goes on and on) Since many of these games also use web based front-ends, which is a sore point for many consoles, it's a real problem. You can't play a game like Astro Empires on a console. Not without a keyboard, at the least. Intense micro-management RPGs also are full of problems. As great as Oblivion was, every minute I played it I was thinking "God, I want a proper keyboard and mouse."
The lack of mandatory 1080P and keyboard/mouse is that's currently holding the consoles back. But since that would make it a "PC" and they don't want to go in that direction, well, we have this divide that isn't going to change any time soon. You simply can't dumb-down an interface that much and expect it to work effectively. Steam's box, though has a lot of promise as it's not trying to fit a genre but a product.
4: Half-life was a joke. Deus Ex was a disaster. Bioware and most of that genre (Mass Effect and so on) were designed to be console games from the beginning, so porting them back to the PC doesn't really count. By that time, though, you had games like HalfLife 2, FEAR, and so on, which even though they were ported to consoles, looked extremely sad.
It may be a matter of time until consoles catch up, but PCs always will move ahead quite a lot faster.
Seriously, you have to be kidding.
PC games are driven by one segment that consoles have yet to make a dent in, which is MMOGs. As long as you need a PC to play WoW and games like it, PCs are going absolutely nowhere for the foreseeable future. And, honestly, Steam does work better than XBox live or the PS3's kludge when it comes to actually keeping track of friends and finding players to play with in most games. Being able to sort by half a dozen variables in most games as well simply doesn't happen with the consoles, either. A great example is compare BF3's servers. How many are actually running with Hardcore, which turns on friendly fire damage?(A: ZERO EA servers and literally 10-12 non EA ones) How easy is it to find a server and save it as a favorite? On the PC, it's dead simple by comparison and many people are running their own servers.
Until we see WoW and other games like it on consoles, AND playing on the same servers, you simply don't have to worry about PCs disappearing.
You're wrongly assuming that they wouldn't just pay Microsoft to use the DirectX drivers. It's a lot cheaper than paying for a whole copy of Windows. Also, NVidia is releasing their drivers for Linux, so there's a good chance that when it's a big multi-million dollar company talking to them, they'll come up with some solution that works and is just rolled into the price of the console.
It's kind of an odd thing, really, that so many people who run Linux automatically assume that you can't use proprietary code. You or I might not *want* to pay for those codecs and drivers just because we're cheap or have some personal issue with doing so, but Steam certainly would have no such reservations.
Of course, the best way to solve this issue would be to have it use Linux and a custom-designed version of Wine. Basically what Transgaming did. It's not going to be easy, but they certainly have the resources to pull it off and if they can, it will mean maybe $20 in licensing fees for a few drivers and codecs, and beyond that, nothing at all.
After all, it's not going to run anything aside from games most of the time and this would allow them to likely use a basic integrated board like a multi-core Atom or similar with a dedicated Nvidia card added. By sticking with off-the shelf components and not having to pay for licensing fees, they can probably crank out a prototype for under a million dollars - way under what a typical console costs to develop. We're talking about $300-$400 or so for a machine that plays your entire Steam library. And if they can come out with it by this holiday season, they'll have blown a huge hole in the nex gen XBox and PS4's market (which is at least a year or two off).
You can count me in as one of them. Not to be a fanboy or anything, but I've been playing around with Mint and it's surprising at how it works without having to pull your hair out. Well enough out of the box that the learning curve is easy enough for my teenage son to figure out. I introduced him to it as his first *IX environment and he's adapting almost as quickly as he did when he first got his hands on my grandparent's Apple.(talking about new user to comfortable in a few *days*) It even auto-detected and configured itself to my network in 5 seconds flat. Sound, video, USB, the works - done and done.
But it's not just Mint. The amount of innovation that is going on in the latest distros (just this last year or so) is incredible. To the point where there are plenty of alternatives that even complete with Windows for once. Especially when a 13 year old kid can DIY and get it right in a single afternoon.
Suse is kind of in a hard place now as distros go. It's well off of the curve code-wise and is looking terribly dated. Of course, there's the whole GUI-hate issue because most of them now suck or are trying to look like an iPhone (not all progress is good, though, especially in the interfaces), but that's an entirely new series of rants... Thankfully you're not stuck there, either, with half a dozen major ones to chose from.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Modern printers usually have a control interface application that tells you how much ink is left and what print options are set and so on. Also, they talk back to the typical application in order to make sure that page settings are correct and that your preview function isn't just it hoping for the best. This is especially true of photo printers, which have a whole set of software running to make sure that your settings are properly calibrated when you scan and/or print.
Working as designed, and in fact, no different than, say, installing a sound card, which has its own software and drivers that go with it. How is the OS supposed to know that it's a legitimate driver and not some virus? I'd rather have it be too careful than take Windows approach of everything is fine unless it hits me upside my head and mugs me.
Besides, bitching about a printer just shows how insular people like him have become after all of these years. Perhaps he should just go buy an IPad and wheel himself into the retirement home.
Heh. I think this judge is going to get his ass handed to him in short order, anyways. I've never heard of such a ludicrous law. It would be so easy to force the issue to conflict with one of more basic legal rights (such as marriage or something similar).
If two of the 4 were developing romantic feelings for each other
This does bring up an interesting point, which is that what does happen if one of them decides to marry one of the other people of the group? I don't think there is any precedent for legally forbidding two normal people to get married.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.100198-Space-Warfare-Almost-Everything-You-Know-Is-Probably-Wrong
Pretty much everything you see in movies is wrong. And in video games. And on TV. And read in books.